Citizen of Nowhere

Reading Jean-Christophe Bailly’ The Animal Side, I find this lovely passage about watching a murmur of starlings: ‘ . . . one evening on the Loire and over a period of hours, the perpetual movement of a… Read More

When you go in search of dolmens, or megalithic tombs, they are not necessarily where you last remember seeing them. If you remember them at all. This one never was so far, nor the path so steep, nor… Read More

Met up with this tortoise on a walk in the Albera range yesterday morning. The Alberas are home to the last natural population of the Mediterranean tortoise (Testudo h. hermanni) in the Iberian Peninsula, and they are a… Read More

Other than an early family holiday and a single trip to Barcelona in my early twenties, my first real taste of Catalunya was in 1984. Penniless and without purpose, I was walking down the coastal road from… Read More

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The Lonely City is an exquisite meditation on loneliness, but it is also so much more. Laing explores the lives of a handful on American artists who knew loneliness well, and whose work often references that state,... Read More

Ryzsard Kapuściński was a Polish writer who spent most of his working life as a roving foreign correspondent for the Polish state news agency (PAP) during the Communist era, but his own writings, in the form of personal... Read More

Having fallen ill on the last day of teaching, the accumulated tensions of the semester finally erupting in an onslaught of snot, fever, and a hideous, raucous cough, I take to my bed in the hope... Read More

There are few ideas more mind-blowing than that of the multiverse, and the notion that the universe is perpetually dividing into parallel universes, each of them containing versions of ourselves. Long before I’d ever heard of the multiverse,... Read More